Seattlite blogger Lovely Lanvin gave me some recommendations for eats during my trip. One of her recommendations was for korean food, with a twist, at Revel. It’s in the Fremont area and it’s fairly new. It’s a pretty gorgeous restaurant. It’s one long rectangular room, with the open kitchen taking up most of one side. There’s a chef’s table along the entire length of the kitchen. The other side has some tables. The walls have several large pop-art paintings. I dig it.I love sitting at the chef’s table because it’s dinner and a show. And it still boggles my mind how the whole thing works. I love to watch everyone. Revel also has adorable plates and flatware. It’s all minimalist. The entire chef’s table is just one giant raw butcher block. I love it. Can I have my kitchen look like this?The menu is quite stark and small, which is the way I like it as I tend to get overwhelmed and indecisive when given too much choice. I started with one of their pancakes, the pork belly, kimchi, and bean sprout. This is definitely korean. It is a good sized pancake served with 4 different sauces. Aren’t they adorable? I liked the pancake, but I would have preferred that the pork belly was more evenly distributed throughout the pancake, and that the pancake would have been thinner. The middle, where it was the thickest, had all the pork belly and had too much not-cooked-all-the-way batter concentrated there. I prefer my korean pajeons to be a bit more crispy on the outside and well cooked on the inside. I think if they made it thinner in general with less batter or if they made the pancake bigger with the same batter, they’d get a better result. But the flavor was definitely good and the pork belly was delicious!My other dish was a noodle dish with five spiced duck meat balls, lacinato kale, smoked chili, with medium thickness noodles. This was definitely tasty, but there was absolutely nothing korean about it. Zilch. Nada. So instead of this being korean with a twist, it was just plain twist. In fact, there was cilantro in this. And cilantro is not in any korean dish, ever. And if you asked korean people of my mom’s generation or older, they would probably not be able to stand cilantro, at all. To see it in this dish was odd. It’s ok though, because I like cilantro! This dish was tasty, nonetheless, until the the unthinkable happened. I suddenly bit into raw thin strips of ginger. How could this be? I’d eaten half the bowl already free of this raw evil, but then all of a sudden it became a raw ginger fest! So then I spent a lot of the rest of my time picking out or deftly avoiding the ginger pieces. This is not easy to do! But I made sure I did it. Oh well. Despite these little glitches, I enjoyed this place immensely. The service was good and I am absolutely in love with the feel of this place. The food was also good, despite how non-korean some of their dishes may be.

PW published their "Philly's Top 15 Drinks" list. So of course, I decided to try them all. Join me for this 15-post series, as I test out each of these cocktails to see just how worthy they are.
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